Saturday, September 27, 2008

What if, as the movie A Day without a Mexican ponders in regards to the Latino population of California, we woke up one morning and whiteness had vanished?

Well, there would be an uproar of course. It would be unfair to have all those non-white faces representing everything from government to toothpaste. Can you imagine the loud outcry from most whites? Yet, somehow, the near invisibility of other-than-whiteness in our world is a-ok, no problem there. It’s enough to make you scream.

[W]henever I hear a leftist with privilege talking about that one time they tried to give someone a loaf of bread, I always detect a note of satisfaction in their voice. If this were truly a problem for people - if people with homes truly cared about the homeless and wanted to help them - we would scramble for other ways to accomplish that. We would engage with them, let them tell us what they need. We would give our money to shelters and programs. We would work harder to create safety nets. But we don’t. The people who moan about the futility of giving don’t really want to give. Instead, they go through the motions so they can get to that punch line: “There’s no point in trying, because they’re lazy and weak and thus belong where they are.”

Officials of a small Christian university say a life-size cardboard reproduction of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was hung from a tree on the campus, an act that outraged students and school leaders alike.

George Fox University President Robin Baker said a custodian discovered the effigy early Tuesday and removed it. University spokesman Rob Felton said Wednesday that the commercially produced reproduction had been suspended from the branch of a tree with fishing line around the neck.

Taped to the cardboard cutout of the black senator from Illinois was a message targeting participants in Act Six, a scholarship program geared toward increasing the number of minority and low-income students at several Christian colleges, mostly in the Northwest.

White flight, city planning, disinvestment, highway building, tax laws and encouraging the movement of businesses to the suburbs, and housing loans and equity historically given only to whites creates non-white neighborhoods. But such neighborhoods have flourished against all odds, creating artistic treasures and special traditions. To black Harlem in particular we owe the Harlem Renaissance, the development of jazz and swing, countless theatre groups, the Harlem Boys Choir, the Apollo Theatre, the Cotton Club, and the Savoy Ballroom. It was white power and non-white disenfranchisement that created non-white neighborhoods and it is white power that allows whites to return, drawn by low rents or pleasing aesthetics without concern for those they displace or the consequences of rising rents and loss of non-white havens. But white might doesn't make white right.

I found my gut reason - the reason why I'm going to go into that voting booth and slam my vote through that ballot box with real umph: I'm voting for Barack Obama to reject the people and the views I met head on earlier this week in a debate with fringe-conservative radio host Dennis Prager. . . .

I've felt sick to my stomach since the debate. I can't really get it out of my head, not because I think I did poorly (on the contrary, most of the objective observers who were there said I held my own), but because I'm nauseated by the number of selfish, hateful and ignorant people that - even in the face of an intensifying war on the middle class - don't care about anyone other than themselves, adamantly refuse to verify their beliefs with empirical facts on the principle that they don't need facts to know "what's right," and cannot see the world from any one else's perspective.

You cannot even meet them on the supposedly "conservative" issues like civil liberties that we should all agree on - many conservatives today are blind authoritarian partisans, people who truly think it is outrageous to say America was misled into the Iraq War, and that that war has something to do with oil. They can only see the world from the gilded gates of their own wealthy white suburbia, and they self-righteously believe that privileged existence is the way every American lives - and if they don't, it's their fault for not trying harder.

White people love Mammy, that fact cannot be denied. As long as she existed in their imagination, black women could indeed be understood to embrace our status at the bottom of the race and class hierarchy. As long as Mammy's booming laugh could be heard in the wind, black women could be said to love their precious white folk. Love is the most wonderful of human emotions, but in this case, it amounts to nothing but a perversion, a symbol of internalized racism, because it allows white people to signify all that is good and pure in this world. Mammy's love of whiteness necessitated a complete denial, and hatred of all things black.

Also, Dave Chappelle and John Mayer prove that white people, when properly stimulated, just can't resist the urge to dance.